1. society
2. welfare

International Tax and Public Finance, 12, 375–393, 2005
c 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. Printed in the Netherlands.
Migration and Social Replacement Incomes: How to
Protect Low-Income Workers in the Industrialized
Countries Against the Forces of Globalization
and Market Integration
HANS-WERNER SINN
Ifo Institute for Economic Research, University of Munich, 81679 Munich, Germany
sinn@ifo.de
Abstract
This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the living standard of its unskilled workers
against the wage competition from immigrants. It shows that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration
into unemployment. Defending wages with replacement incomes brings about first order efficiency losses that
approximate the budget cost of the government. By contrast, wage subsidies involve much smaller welfare losses.
While the exclusion of migrants from a national wage replacement program does not avoid the distortions in labor
migration, the (temporary) exclusion of migrants from a national wage subsidy program makes it possible to reach
the first best migration pattern despite the preservation of the welfare state.
Keywords: migration, unemployment, welfare
JEL Code: F15, F22, I38, H5, J61
1.
Introduction
The world is integrating at a rapid pace. Since China and India have decided to participate in
world trade, since the Iron Curtain has fallen, since the EU has integrated its internal market
and expanded to the east, and since NAFTA has opened the US to trade with Mexico,
the relative factor endowments in the market economies linked by trade have changed
dramatically. Capital has become a scarce factor of production, and unskilled labor has
become an abundant factor, the scapegoat of an otherwise beneficial economic development
process. The integration of markets is reaping gains from trade, but due to the forces of
factor price equalization these gains are accompanied by significant income losses of the
working classes in the western countries, at least against the trend that otherwise would
have prevailed. The achievements of a hundred years of social democracy are at risk.
In principle, the forces that put pressure on the wages of less qualified workers in the
industrialized countries already come into operation via Heckscher-Ohlin type trade specialization and via capital movements. However, in many countries they are reinforced by
migration processes triggered by huge wage differences. The east west migration in Europe
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that has taken place since the fall of the Iron Curtain and will continue in the years to come is
an example. The average wage of the about 75 million people from central eastern Europe
that joined the EU in 2004 is about one fifth of the EU average and about one seventh
of the west German average.1 After a transition period not to last longer than until 2010
workers from the new EU countries will be able to offer their services in any of the old EU
countries.
Ordinary workers in the industrialized countries are afraid of what will happen, and their
fears may well be justified. They will not belong to the winners of this period of economic
development. The winners are capital owners and skilled workers. It is true that market
integration is likely to bring about gains from trade, but there are gains from trade only
in the sense that the winners will gain more than the losers will lose. Gains from trade do
not come about as Pareto improvements, but rather as Kaldor type gains where the winners
could compensate the losers although they do not normally do so.
From a social perspective, this is truly disquieting. Thus it is understandable that the
losers appeal to the welfare state to compensate them. The welfare state, however, cannot
help much since the more it helps the more it will come under pressure itself. The theory
of systems competition has nothing but discomforting news in this regard. If only because
of the mobility of labor, the welfare states will rather be engaged in a kind of deterrence
competition in order to avoid becoming the target of welfare migration.
Yet, at least in western Europe, the welfare state is still intact and will exert its influence
on the migration processes involved. This is the theme of this paper. It is about the effects of
the welfare state on migration and about possible reforms that may help this state to better
deal with the redistributive forces of market integration in general and labor migration in
particular. The paper will look at how existing social systems influence immigration and
what effect they will exert on the wages of unskilled labor. It will then proceed to identify
policy measures that would help improve the economy’s reaction including those that enable the welfare state to perform its compensation function despite the forces of systems
competition. It assumes a distributional goal for government intervention and investigates
the possibilities of achieving this goal with the smallest possible loss of utility or income
for other groups of society.
The existing fiscal competition literature is complemented in various ways. Where that
literature deals with the reaction of welfare states to migration, it typically models the
welfare state as an institution that pays wage subsidies that are added to the wage and
increase the incentive to migrate into an otherwise well functioning economy with a flexible
labor market.2 However, the true welfare state of the European type differs substantially
from this. It offers social replacement incomes to those who do not work rather than paying
out wage subsidies. Such replacement incomes make wages rigid, unable to react to the
competitive forces. It will be shown that replacement incomes bring about reactions to
the migration pressure that are dissimilar to the wage subsidies studied in the literature,3
notwithstanding the fact that such subsidies would indeed be better tools of the welfare state
if combined with a Principle of Selectively Delayed Integration, as will be shown below.
This investigation is phrased in terms of labor migration, because this is where policy
interferes most with market forces. On the one hand, governments impose constraints on
migration. On the other, the redistributive fiscal measures of the state automatically act
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL REPLACEMENT INCOMES
377
as welfare magnets for the poor. If the full gains from trade in goods and factors do not
materialize in reality it is mostly because government actions distort the labor market.
Nevertheless, this study is fully compatible with the other forces that work towards factor
price equalization, provided they are not as perfect as in textbook models. It is therefore
assumed in this paper that labor migration cannot be fully substituted by commodity trade
and capital movements and indeed makes a contribution to improving the efficiency of the
international allocation of resources.
2.
The Basic Model
To concentrate on the complications of the welfare state measures, the model assumes
an extremely simple competitive economy as described in the seminal paper by Wildasin
(1991). The economy produces a homogeneous traded good with only one factor, labor, by
means of the production function f (L) with normal properties. Workers, the “poor”, earn
the wage w that equals the marginal product of labor, f (L) = w. The rich who own an
immobile factor, say land, earn the remaining income f − f (L)L. Little would change in
the model if other mobile factors such as capital were assumed in addition, provided that
the immobile factor would still be owned by the rich. Domestic labor of the amount L¯ is
inelastically supplied and so is the immobile factor.
Similar conditions hold in the rest of the world. Let ϕ(L ∗ ) be the corresponding production
function abroad such that ϕ (L ∗ ) = w ∗ determines the set of equilibrium combinations
of foreign employment and wage. Let L¯ ∗ be the initial foreign labor endowment. When
X denotes the stock of migrants in the domestic country and markets clear, then L =
L¯ + X, L ∗ = L¯ ∗ − X .
The domestic country is the high-wage country facing immigration pressure. Assume
therefore that, when migration is prohibited, w
¯ < w
¯ ∗ , where w
¯ and w
¯ ∗ are the autarky
¯
¯∗
∗
wages defined by f ( L) = w
¯ and ϕ ( L ) = w
¯ . (Recall that currently, the countries under
consideration being, say, west Germany and the new east European EU countries, w
¯ is
seven times as large as w
¯ ∗ .) The domestic country faces an upward sloping migrant supply
curve relating the stock of immigrants to its own wage. The curve is upward sloping for
two reasons. First, the more people come, the scarcer becomes labor abroad and the higher
therefore the foreign wage of the migrants. Second, as people with low migration costs
will come first, the marginal cost of migration will be the higher the more have already
come.
To model migration costs, think of the European type of commuter migration rather than
the American type of permanent immigration. Assume therefore that migration costs are a
flow that accrues as long as the migrant lives in the host country. The costs include the cost
of regular home travel, of having to pay higher rent in the host country or simply of suffering
from homesickness. Let ψ(X ), ψ(0) = 0, ψ ≥ 0, ψ > 0, be the aggregate migration cost
as a function of the stock of migrants such that ψ (X ) is the migration cost of an additional
migrant if X people have already come.4 Then, with open borders, the migration equilibrium
and the corresponding wage wC are given by
f ( L¯ + X ) = wC = ϕ ( L¯ ∗ − X ) + ψ (X ).
(1)
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Figure 1.
Efficient immigration.
Obviously this migration equilibrium is efficient. Market forces determine the stock of
migrants such that international welfare W , defined as the joint GDP net of the aggregate
migration cost,
W = f (L) + ϕ( L¯ ∗ − X ) − ψ(X ),
(2)
is maximized with regard to X , assuming for the time being that L = L¯ + X, i.e. that all
immigrants are employed. The marginal migrant who is indifferent between coming and
staying at home expects a wage increase that just equals his migration cost. As wages equal
marginal productivities at home and abroad, the wage increase equals the increase of the
joint GDP, and hence with the marginal migrant the increase in the joint GDP is just enough
to balance the additional migration cost. International welfare is at its maximum.
Figure 1 illustrates the equilibrium. The downward sloping curve is the labor demand
curve and the upper of the upward sloping curves is the migrant supply curve. The demand
curve represents the marginal product of labor, and the supply curve represents the foreign
wage plus the marginal migration cost. When the border is closed, the domestic wage rate
is w
¯ or BJ. Opening the border leads to immigration until the point of intersection C of the
two curves is reached. Immigration is then JK, the domestic wage is wC or CK, and the
foreign wage is w∗ or FK. Despite migration, there remains a wage difference equal to CF
due to the migration cost.
Migration generates a welfare gain because all economies involved are now better off.
Domestic output increases by BCKJ, but as the wage bill of the migrants is only DCKJ,
there is a surplus BCD for domestic residents. And while foreigners have an aggregate
migration cost HCF and face an output loss equal to HFKJ, the wage income they earn in
the host country is DCKJ. Thus they collect a migration rent equal to DCH.
The social problem resulting from this development is the decline in the domestic wage,
the income of the poor, from w
¯ to wC . Since firms would replace expensive nationals with
cheap migrants if domestic wages did not decline, the wage of the nationals will fall from w
¯
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL REPLACEMENT INCOMES
379
to wC . This implies a redistribution of income from poor to rich nationals in the amount of
ABDE: The rich will not only capture the gain BCD from employing cheap migrants, but
will also enjoy the redistribution gain. The pie becomes bigger, but many people will get an
absolutely smaller piece. This is the problem of market integration as perceived nowadays
in the industrialized countries. The welfare gain is accompanied by absolute losses for a
large part of society, if not the majority.
Proposition 1. Migration costs will bring immigration from the low wage country to a halt
when the wage difference equals the marginal migration cost. Free migration maximizes
the combined GDP of the countries net of migration cost. The “poor” workers in the
industrialized countries nevertheless lose, and “rich” residual claimants gain more than
the workers lose.
3.
Fixing Replacement Incomes
Let us now consider the role of the welfare state, which under realistic conditions pays social
replacement incomes to those who do not work. In the past, social replacement incomes
like unemployment benefits and welfare payments have largely followed the evolution of
wages. Unemployment benefits did so automatically, and welfare payments were adjusted
by political decisions. Both represent lower bounds on wages, which hamper the market
adjustment to immigration and lead to a different development of the labor market from
that described in Figure 1.
Western governments have tended to defend replacement incomes despite the wage inflexibility this has created. In Germany, for example, the government has even increased
welfare much faster than average wages over the last three decades with the consequence of
creating mass unemployment among the less skilled and making the country world champion in this regard (Sinn, 2003). As mentioned in the introduction, this kind of reaction
has little resemblance with the kind of government interventions considered in the fiscal
competition literature.
Let R be the replacement income per person offered by the government. The replacement
income is financed with taxes on the rich. Assume for the moment that the replacement
income is available to nationals as well as immigrants. This assumption will be relaxed in
the next section. Let R ≥ wC so that the replacement income is effectively binding domestic
wages from below. No one will be willing to work for a wage that is lower than what the
government pays for not working, and the government pays more than the market would
have determined after immigration. Under these conditions, the number of available jobs
will not be sufficient to accommodate the migrants. This is so a fortiori, as the replacement
income will also act as an immigration magnet, attracting more workers than would have
come under a pure market solution. The migration equilibrium is now given by
f (L) = R = ϕ ( L¯ ∗ − X ) + ψ (X ).
(3)
Replacement incomes result in immigration into unemployment, as the work force available
in the domestic country is L¯ + X, while the workers’ incentive constraint w ≥ R implies
that L < L¯ + X when R > wC . Figure 2 illustrates the equilibrium with points B and T.
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Figure 2.
Replacement incomes: Migration into unemployment.
The equilibrium deviates substantially from the efficient immigration equilibrium shown
in Figure 1 and characterized by point C. On the one hand, employment is lower implying
a comparative output loss of size B CKJ . On the other hand, immigration is higher by the
amount KY. Higher immigration implies less production abroad and higher migration costs.
The sum of these two disadvantages relative to the optimum is shown by the area CTYK.
Thus, the total welfare loss relative to the efficient migration pattern is B CTYJ .
The only advantage of this kind of government intervention is that it succeeds in defending
the living standard of the poor. However, the disadvantage is a double welfare loss insofar as
the policy destroys jobs at home and nevertheless brings in additional workers from abroad.
It would obviously always be better from an international welfare perspective to defend a
certain wage of the domestic poor by immigration controls than by using a replacement
strategy. If the replacement strategy would effectively defend the autarky wage, R = w,
¯
it would be so catastrophic that it would even be better to keep the borders closed. While
migrants would add nothing to the domestic GDP in either case, the migration costs and
the foreign output loss due to the emigrating labor could be avoided.
Proposition 2. Defending low domestic wages with replacement incomes prevents the
creation of additional jobs for the migrants and attracts more immigrants than would have
come in a laissez faire equilibrium. There is immigration into unemployment. From an
international welfare perspective, the policy is worse than supporting the same wage of
the poor by means of immigration controls because it lures people away from productive
foreign activities without providing them with additional domestic jobs.
The welfare loss is huge also relative to the budget cost of the replacement incomes. In
the figure, the budget cost is equal to B TYJ . This differs from the international welfare
loss only by the triangle B TC, and this triangle is relatively smaller the less the replacement
income R deviates from the undistorted equilibrium wage wC . In fact, in the limit, as R
approaches wC from above, the relative size of the triangle shrinks to zero.
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL REPLACEMENT INCOMES
381
A more precise analysis that looks at the marginal impact of a change in R on the
international welfare cost and the budget is as follows. The government’s budget cost under
the replacement strategy, B R , is given by
B R = R · (R)
(4)
(R) = L¯ + X (R) − L(R)
(5)
where
is the level of unemployment as a function of R with X (R) and L(R) denoting the implicit
effect on migration and domestic employment of R as given by (3). Obviously, it follows
from equation (3) that
L (R) =
1
f (L)
<0
and
X (R) =
ψ (X )
1
> 0.
− ϕ ( L¯ ∗ − X )
Differentiating equation (4) with respect to R using (5) yields
dB R
= + R · (X (R) − L (R)),
(6)
dR
and differentiating the international welfare function (2) with respect to R (where it is no
longer true that L = L¯ + X ), taking account of (3), yields
dW
= f (L)L (R) − (ϕ ( L¯ ∗ − X ) + ψ (X ))X (R)
dR
= −R · (X (R) − L (R)).
(7)
It follows from (6) and (7) that the marginal welfare effect of an increase in the government’s
expenditure resulting from an increase in the replacement income R is given by
dW
−1
=
.
dB R
1 + R·(X −L )
(8)
In the limiting case where the replacement income equals the wage in a first best migration
equilibrium and where there is hence no unemployment, = 0, this derivative simplifies
to:
dW
= −1 for R = wC .
(9)
dB R
It follows by continuity arguments that a “small” effective replacement strategy to protect
domestic wages incurs a welfare loss that is equal to its budget cost. What this means is that
if God provided the national government with an additional euro to be spent on replacement
incomes, the domestic and foreign private sectors as a whole would not be better off in terms
of a Kaldorian efficiency view. Private agents would change their behavior in such a way
as to destroy exactly one euro of economic resources.
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It may also be useful to translate this into the more familiar notion of the marginal cost of
public funds, M. Suppose the government gains an additional euro by curtailing replacement
incomes (dB R < 0). The marginal cost of this euro to the private sector is the liquidity cost
plus the marginal welfare loss which in the present case is negative, however. It follows
from (9) that the marginal cost of raising public funds by a cut in replacement incomes is
given by:
dW
= 0 for R = wC .
(10)
dB R
Thus there are no private costs in the efficiency sense if the government gains funds by
curtailing a small replacement program. Instead of running a small replacement income
program it could throw away the money that otherwise would have been given to the unemployed, and the private sector as a whole would not be worse off. This, too, demonstrates
how absurd the replacement strategy is from an efficiency point of view.
M ≡1+
Proposition 3. The international welfare loss of a small program of social replacement
incomes is about equal to the budget cost of this program, and the marginal cost of raising
public funds by curtailing such a program is zero from an international welfare perspective.
Rather than from an international welfare perspective, the problem might also be studied
from a national welfare perspective. Unlike (2), national welfare, Wn , is national output
minus the income earned by foreigners, which is either the replacement income or a wage
of the same size if the replacement income is a binding constraint on wages:
Wn = f (L) − R · X,
R = w,
for R ≥ wC .
(11)
It was shown above that, from an international welfare perspective, the replacement strategy is inferior to a policy of immigration controls that defends the same wage. Equation (11)
makes it clear that the same holds true from a national welfare perspective. While domestic employment L, domestic output and the payment per immigrant, w or R, respectively,
would be the same, immigration controls trivially imply less immigration and hence lower
national expenses for foreigners than a replacement strategy that brings about the same
living standard for the domestic poor. National welfare is higher.
To calculate the marginal effect on national welfare of a budget expansion, note that,
because of (3), the derivative of (11) with respect to R can be expressed as
dWn
= −R · (X (R) − L (R)) − X.
dR
The first term of this equation measures the additional expenses resulting from the increase
in unemployment, given R, and the second term measures the increase in the migrants’
replacement income or wage, given the number of migrants. Because of (3) and (6), and
analogously to (8), one gets
dWn
X + R · (X − L )
.
=−
dB R
+ R · (X − L )
This expression takes on a value of −1 if the government defends the pre-immigration wage,
R = w,
¯ for in that case immigration goes fully into additional unemployment, X = .
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL REPLACEMENT INCOMES
383
For smaller values of R, however, the expression is even more strongly negative, since
shrinks faster than X if the economy approaches the first best equilibrium as given by
point C in the figure. Thus, if God provided the government with an additional euro in a
situation where unemployment is less than immigration, not only would the euro be wasted
on a payment for unemployment, but in addition, nationals would lose because the euro
would be used to bid up the wages earned by immigrants at the expense of their national
employers. Thus the gift of a euro to the national government that the government then
uses to expand its replacement program would make nationals worse off from a Kaldorian
efficiency perspective.
Translated into a national concept of the marginal cost of public funds, Mn , similar to
(10), it follows that
Mn
=
=
0⇔R
w,
¯
<
<
R ≥ wC .
Thus, from a national perspective, the marginal cost of public funds is zero when the
government begins to dismantle a replacement income that equals the autarky wage, and
the marginal cost will even be negative if a less extensive replacement wage strategy is
pursued. This is the world of Cockaigne for a government that pursues the rules of optimal
tax theory. When public funds were taken away from the replacement program to finance
the provision of public goods, private nationals would be strictly better off even if the public
goods were perfectly useless. Alternatively, the government could use the money saved to
make lump sum gifts to foreign residents which would not affect the migration volume, and
yet domestic residents as a whole would be better off.
The result can be demonstrated in Figure 2. Suppose the government completely abolishes
the replacement program such that the economy moves from points B and T on the labor
demand and supply curves towards the intersection point C and uses the budgetary funds
set free for purposes that do not provide utility to nationals. In this case nationals would
nevertheless gain, because the rent from employing foreigners at a wage that equals the
marginal product of labor would rise. Before the abolition of the replacement program, this
rent is BB D . After its abolition it is BCD. Thus nationals enjoy a Kaldorian welfare gain
equal to D B CD, notwithstanding the fact, of course, that there is a redistribution from poor
to rich nationals of size ZD DE.
Proposition 4. With free migration the national welfare loss of a program of social replacement incomes exceeds the budget cost of this program. The national marginal social cost of
public funds gained by curtailing such a program is negative if the program is less generous
than necessary to defend the autarky wage. If the replacement program is generous enough
to support the autarky wage, the marginal national welfare loss from spending money on
the program is minus one, and the national marginal social cost of public funds gained
by curtailing the program is zero. Also, trivially, from a national welfare perspective the
replacement strategy is inferior to immigration controls as a tool to defend the national
wage of low-income workers.
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Excluding the Non-Working Migrants
Thus far it has been assumed that migrants are fully included in the welfare measures of
the state, in particular that they have full access to the replacement incomes offered by
the government. This is not typically the case, however, since most states do not allow
foreigners to directly immigrate into their welfare systems. For example, according to EU
rules, welfare benefits and similar replacement incomes are limited to workers. Those who
immigrate without working, will not, in general, be entitled to social aid or other replacement
incomes. It is true that the inclusion rules as defined in the new EU Constitution of June 2004
and the EU Directive on Free Movement of May 2004 have become much more generous
in this regard recently. Nevertheless, at least in the past, only workers were given full access
to the benefits of the welfare state.
At first glance, it might seem that with this modification a much more favorable migration
pattern would result. For example, one might suspect that in Figure 2 immigration would
only be JJ , since additional workers find no jobs, or that only some of the J Y immigrants
not needed by the labor market would come since they would weight, in a Harris-Todardo
fashion, the domestic wage with the probability of finding a job, where the probability is
given by one minus the unemployment rate. However, such considerations do not apply
since the welfare state is available to the domestic unemployed.
In general, labor markets do not ration employment by seniority rules or randomly, but
inversely to the reservation wages. The labor market functions just like any other market.
Given the market price, the high cost suppliers, whose average variable cost is above the
market price, are out, while the low cost suppliers whose average variable cost is below that
price, are in.
When the government limits the payment of replacement incomes to domestic workers,
these workers have a reservation wage equal to the replacement income. They are the high
cost suppliers who are rationed first. By contrast, the immigrants, who are not eligible for
welfare, have lower reservations wages, determined by the sum of the foreign wage and
the marginal migration cost. Thus, all immigrants find jobs, and domestic workers service
whatever is left of the firms’ aggregate demand. The remainder of the domestic workers
becomes unemployed.
Figure 3 illustrates this. The figure resembles Figure 2, but explicitly draws in the market
supply curve for the domestic labor market. With the given replacement income R, domestic
¯ The JY
workers have a horizontal labor supply curve up to their capacity constraint L.
immigrants, though, all have lower reservation wages, as depicted by the immigration labor
supply curve HT. This segment of the immigrants’ labor supply curve therefore constitutes
the inframarginal part H T of the aggregate labor supply curve. After this segment comes
¯ which reflects the domestic workers’ segment of the supply
a horizontal stretch, T T = L,
curve. Thereafter, to the right of T, the aggregate supply curve continues with those foreign
workers who, because they have reservation wages above R, do not migrate. It follows that
only T B domestic workers are employed, and B T domestic workers are being crowded
out into unemployment.
There still is immigration into unemployment triggered by the welfare state, but it is
indirect immigration, pushing domestic residents out of their jobs. In order for the economy
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL REPLACEMENT INCOMES
385
Figure 3. Replacement incomes only for domestic residents: Indirect immigration into unemployment.
to create jobs for the immigrants, wages would have to fall, but they cannot do so because the
fixed replacement income offered by the government makes domestic workers the marginal
suppliers in the market. Rather than participating in low wage competition with the migrants,
nationals will accept to be seated in the easy chair offered by the welfare state, but as long
as not all of them are crowded out by the migrants, they will stay the marginal suppliers
and prevent the wage rate from falling after immigration.
To avoid crowding out nationals, a combination of wage freeze and dismissal protection
is sought in most industrialized countries. In theory, this could reverse the market rationing
scheme and it could protect the domestic workers by effectively differentiating wages similar
to a price discriminating monopolist. However, this can at best be a temporary solution since
despite dismissal protection there is a natural exchange in the labor market due to stochastic
personal events that force people to quit jobs or due the normal generational exchange of the
workforce. The flow of domestic residents offering their services in the labor market will go
directly into unemployment before the wage can fall due to the competition of immigrants.
Only if the flow of immigrants is larger than the flow of new domestic workers seeking jobs,
will there be a pressure on wages that could possibly create more jobs. However, this is an
unlikely condition. In Germany, for example, 7 million people per year lose their jobs and
7 million find new ones, but the flow of immigrants is in the order of only a few hundreds
of thousands.
Within the present model, the limited inclusion rights of foreigners have no welfare
implications, and in fact they imply no modifications of any of the equations set up above. As
the wage that lures the migrants still equals the replacement income R, the size of migration
is the same as before. The assumption that the immigrants rather than the nationals suffer
from unemployment was never needed, and the rationing pattern was indeterminate anyway.
Proposition 5. If immigrants are not eligible for wage replacement incomes, there will be
indirect immigration into unemployment in the sense that immigrants crowd out national
residents from the labor market. The wage will not be able to fall below the reservation wage
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set by the government, unless all national low-income workers have been crowded out by
the immigrants. The welfare analysis of a restriction of replacement incomes to nationals
does not differ from the case where non-employed immigrants are fully included.
The identity of the welfare calculation would no longer hold, if domestic residents were
assumed to prefer being unemployed and collecting replacement income rather than earning this income with their own work. In that case, there would be a slight advantage from
excluding the foreigners from directly migrating into the welfare state. However, the reservation wages of domestic workers would be higher and even more immigration would be
induced. Insofar a less disastrous migration pattern could hardly be expected than the one
described by the model.
The reality of welfare states speaks a clear language in this regard. Germany, for example,
had immigration of 7.6 million people from 1970 to 2002 of which about 3.1 million entered
official employment. At the same time, mass unemployment occurred. Whereas there had
hardly been any unemployment in 1970 (150,000), by 2002 unemployment among nationals
had increased by 3.2 million people. Although no proof, the coincidence between these
numbers is remarkable. It fits the very generous German system of social aid that provides
an income for a family of four that is more than four times the Polish wage. It also fits
the observation that Germany had quadrupled its welfare level from 1970 to 2000 while
industrial wages in the same period of time had “only” tripled. With the generous expansion
of the welfare state since the 1970s, Germany compressed its wage scale from below while
the country experienced mass immigration. Small wonder that mass unemployment resulted.
5.
Wage Subsidies
Social replacement payments are made to individuals on condition that they do not work.
Thus it should not be surprising that the welfare implications are so unfavorable.
Subsidies which are not conditioned on idleness might be a better means to protect domestic workers from the forces of low wage competition. As mentioned in the introduction
most of the literature on welfare state competition has modeled the welfare state as an institution that pays subsidies to the poor and recently Dr`eze (2002) has advocated subsidies as
a means to defend European workers against the forces of globalization. Let S be a personal
subsidy like the US Earned Income Tax Credit which is available to a low income worker
and assume for the time being that this subsidy is provided to nationals and immigrants
alike. If applied in Europe, this assumption would reflect the strict non-discrimination rules
of the EU that allow for a distinction between employed nationals and non-employed immigrants, but not between employed nationals and employed immigrants. Then, instead of
(1) or (3) the migration equilibrium is given by
f ( L¯ + X ) + S = ϕ ( L¯ ∗ − X ) + ψ (X ),
(12)
where the market wage under the subsidy scheme satisfies the condition f ( L¯ + X ) = w S
and a worker’s income including the subsidy is w
¯ S = w S + S.
This policy measure does not create unemployment, but since it raises the income of
workers above the marginal product of labor, it attracts additional workers from abroad.
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL REPLACEMENT INCOMES
Figure 4.
387
Wage subsidies.
Only to the extent that the reservation wages of these workers are being pushed up due to
an increased labor scarcity abroad and increased marginal migration costs will the policy
succeed in raising or defending the standard of living of the national poor.
Figure 4 illustrates the immigration equilibrium. The subsidy drives a wedge of size S
or M Q between the required marginal compensation of migrants—the sum of the foreign
marginal product of labor and the marginal migration cost—and the marginal domestic
product of labor. Compared to laissez faire, it induces additional immigration KY . While
the domestic wage falls from wC to w S , the income of domestic workers rises to w
¯ S . With a
sufficiently generous subsidy it would be possible to fully protect the incomes of domestic
workers from the competition of migration, pushing them back to the autarky level w.
¯
From an international welfare perspective, the subsidy strategy seems less problematic
than the replacement strategy since employment is higher and no human resources are
wasted. However, there is a welfare loss insofar as immigration exceeds the optimum,
which means that the additional migrants produce less in the host country than would be
required to compensate for the loss in foreign production plus the migration cost. In Figure
4, the welfare loss is given by the triangle CM Q .
Figure 4 suggests that the welfare loss is small relative to the budget cost A M Q I when
S is small. To verify this, consider the budget cost
BS = S · ( L¯ + X (S))
(13)
where X (S) is the functional relationship between S and X as implied by (12) which satisfies
1
X (S) = > 0.
(14)
ψ (X ) − f ( L¯ + X ) − ϕ ( L¯ ∗ − X )
Differentiating (13) and the welfare function (2) with respect to S, using (12) and (14).
yields
dBS
= L + S · X (S)
dS
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SINN
and
dW
= ( f − ϕ − ψ ) · X (S)
dS
= −S · X (S).
Using (12), these two equations together can be shown to imply
dW
S · X (S)
=−
.
dBS
L + S · X (S)
In the limiting case where S = 0 this indeed reduces to
dW
= 0 for S = 0
dBS
rather than −1 as with the replacement strategy. Accordingly, the marginal cost of raising
public funds by curtailing a small subsidy program is one,
dW
M ≡1+
= 1 for S = 0,
dBS
rather than zero as before. This is the usual result for small deviations from the first best
allocative optimum. As the welfare loss is a second order effect, it can be neglected for
small government interventions.
Proposition 6. Wage subsidies can be used to protect the living standard of low income
earners, but they imply excessive immigration. Small subsidies involve only second-order
international welfare effects such that the marginal international cost of public funds generated by curtailing a small subsidy program is about one.
Things are different from a national welfare perspective. With regard to national welfare,
a subsidy strategy is an expensive way to support the workers’ wages because the country
could try to exploit a monopsony position with regard to the immigrants, and for that
purpose a tax on workers rather than a subsidy would be optimal from a Kaldorian efficiency
perspective. National welfare is defined as the difference between national output and the
wage and subsidy income paid out to migrants:
Wn = f ( L¯ + X ) − X · (ws + S).
(15)
As can easily be demonstrated, the situation where Wn is maximized and hence dWn /dBS =
0, is characterized by a negative value of S. The dashed marginal expenditure curve ME
in Figure 4 sketches the argument showing the optimal tax N P , i.e. the optimal size of
the negative subsidy. Distorting the laissez faire equilibrium with a subsidy for workers
would therefore involve a first order rather than a second order welfare loss from a national
perspective.
Nevertheless, the subsidy strategy is a more rational strategy than the replacement income
strategy to defend the wages of the poor against the competition of migrants for the simple
reason that domestic output is higher. Suppose both strategies target the same income level
for domestic workers, i.e. suppose that
R = w S + S > wC
such that X (R) = X (S)
(16)
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL REPLACEMENT INCOMES
389
In this case both the replacement strategy and the subsidy strategy result in the same
migration volume, the same loss in foreign output and the same income earned by foreigners.
However, as domestic employment and output is higher with the subsidy strategy, inspection
of the welfare functions (2), (11) and (15) shows that both international and national welfare
would be higher under the subsidy strategy by the additional domestic output that this
strategy allows to be produced.
As output is higher while the income of national workers and migrants is the same, it is
clear that the “rich” domestic residual claimants will be better off with the subsidy strategy
regardless of which of the strategies has a lower budget cost and hence involves lower taxes
on the rich.
Interestingly enough, it also follows immediately from (12), (15) and (16) that migration
controls that target the same income for the domestic poor would even be better than
subsidies from a national perspective.5 Such controls would involve lower domestic output,
but as the excluded migrants all have a marginal product below this target income, the output
loss would be more than outweighed by the lower income payments to migrants. However,
migration controls are no solution to the problem of protecting the income of the poor when
there is migration, as was assumed in this paper.
Returning to the comparison between the replacement and the subsidy strategies, it might
be interesting to know which strategy will incur the lower budget cost. Comparing (4) and
(5) with (13) shows that
<
<
BS = B R ⇔ S · ( L¯ + X (S)) = R · ( L¯ + X (R) − L(R)).
>
>
Taking account of (16) and noting that, by assuming equal target incomes for the poor,
X (S) = X (R), this expression can be transformed to
<
<
( L¯ + X (R) − L(R))/L(R)
BS = B R ⇔ 1 =
.
S/w S
>
>
Note that the right-hand side of this expression is the absolute value of the elasticity of the
firms’ labor demand curve: The subsidy strategy is accompanied by a wage rate that is lower
by the amount S than with the replacement strategy and generates a higher employment
volume, just enough to eliminate the unemployment that would result from the replacement strategy, L¯ + X (R) − L(R). Obviously, therefore, the denominator of the expression
indicates a relative wage decline and the numerator the corresponding relative employment
increase, the ratio of these values being the elasticity of the labor demand curve.
The size of the aggregate labor demand elasticity is not quite clear empirically, and
specific elasticities for the low wage sector are particularly scarce. The elasticity level also
depends on the time perspective. In the short run it is smaller than in the long run, because in
the long run other factors, which have not been included here formally, may also change. In
the limiting case, where capital movements and/or Heckscher-Ohlin specialization effects
are sufficient to bring about factor price equalization, the labor demand elasticity would
even be infinite. As a rule of thumb, the elasticity is about unity in the medium term
and greater than one in the long term perspective.6 This in itself suggests that the subsidy
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SINN
strategy will be accompanied by the same or even smaller budget costs than the replacement
strategy.
Proposition 7. From a national perspective, wage subsidies are problematic means to
defend the income of the poor, since wage taxes would allow the country to exploit a
monopsony position relative to the emigration countries. Yet, the subsidy strategy clearly
outperforms the replacement strategy insofar as, with a given income being secured for the
poor, both national and international welfare will be higher. When the elasticity of labor
demand is above unity in absolute terms, the subsidy strategy will even be cheaper for the
government. From a national welfare perspective, migration controls dominate subsidies
and replacement incomes as measures to defend the income of the poor.
6.
Selectively Delayed Integration and Home Country Principle
While migration controls dominate the subsidy strategy in terms of defending the income of
the national poor with a minimum cost to other groups of the society, they imply throwing
the baby out with the bathwater. The gains from trade that market integration promises
would not be available with such a measure. A yet better strategy that outperforms all
policy measures considered thus far is to differentiate incomes between immigrants and
nationals by paying the wage subsidies to nationals only. Dismissal protection plus wage
freeze is one way of differentiation, but as argued above, it does not work well because of
natural job fluctuation. A differentiation by nationality, on the other hand, would be easier
to administer and compatible with a liberal labor market regime.
The Principle of Selectively Delayed Integration of employed immigrants has been suggested for this purpose.7 According to this principle, immigrant workers do pay their taxes
and social security contributions, they receive all contribution-financed social benefits, and
they have free access to the public infrastructure. However, during some initial waiting period some of the tax-financed social benefits are excluded so as to avoid making gifts to the
migrants. In addition, the Home Country Principle could be used for welfare payments to
non-employed immigrants, which means that these immigrants would have to claim support
from the emigration country if they are needy.8
Such a solution would obviously be compatible with a first best migration equilibrium
as depicted in Figure 1, since it would not interfere with the marginal conditions of that
solution. The redistribution loss ABDE resulting from the competition of migrants could
be avoided by paying the subsidy to the nationals only. The government could effectively
compensate the losers of market integration without making them the marginal, high-cost
suppliers in the labor market. The tax revenue needed to finance this compensation would
be levied on the rich. The rich would nevertheless gain from market integration because they
could capture the rent BCD from employing the migrants, and the foreigners would receive
their migration rent DCH as was explained above. If the same income of the domestic poor
were to be ensured by an immigration control, none of these two rents would accrue. Both
countries’ national welfare would be lower. Aggregate welfare would be lower by the area
BCH in Figure 1.9
MIGRATION AND SOCIAL REPLACEMENT INCOMES
391
Proposition 8. A simple and efficient way to defend the incomes of the poor against the
low-wage competition of migrants would be the payment of wage subsidies coupled with
the policy of Selectively Delayed Integration for employed migrants (and the Home Country
Principle for non-employed migrants). National and international welfare would be higher
than with migration controls defending the same income of the domestic poor.
7.
Concluding Remarks
This paper has analyzed the possibilities to defend the wages of the poor against the lowwage competition of migrants. Defending social standards or replacement incomes were
shown to be very inefficient ways for the government to proceed. The maintenance of
standards makes the poor worse off than without government action, and replacement
incomes are so extremely inefficient that the marginal cost of raising public funds by
dismantling them would be close to zero from an international, and even negative from
a national, welfare perspective. Wage subsidies, if possible ones that are restricted to the
domestic population, turned out to be much better alternatives from the point of view of
economic efficiency and the size of the government expenses necessary to defend a given
income level.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, wage subsidies that are limited to nationals would, in
addition, have the advantage of not being eroded by the forces of systems competition. As
migrants do not cause public resource costs, there would be no incentive for governments
to participate in a game of deterrence with regard to migration flows.
There would, however, be legal problems when it comes to intra-EU migration. Currently,
EU rules forbid the discrimination of employed immigrants by excluding them from some
of the benefits the welfare state is offering. It is true that the UK and Ireland have succeeded
in negotiating exclusion rules before agreeing to the draft of the new EU constitution.
However, Article II 94 of that constitution explicitly excludes similar exceptions in the
future. It remains to be seen whether the new constitution will be ratified by the countries
of Europe. If so, the discrimination strategy would no longer be feasible. In that case only
the other solutions discussed in this paper would remain. Basically this means that the
replacement strategies should be abandoned. Only a limited program of income subsidies
to the poor would be compatible with a roughly efficient migration pattern in Europe.
Acknowledgment
The author wishes to thank an anonymous referee and the editor, Jay Wilson, for useful
comments.
Notes
1. For a more extensive discussion of the economic consequences of these huge wage differences see Sinn (2003,
chapters 2 and 8).
392
SINN
2. See, e.g., Brown and Oates (1987), Wildasin (1991, 1994), Cremer and Pestieau (1996), Wilson (2004) and the
literature survey by Brueckner (2000).
3. See also the non-technical treatment of the theme in Sinn (2003). Sinn and Ochel (2003) discuss replacement
incomes and social standards from the viewpoint of EU harmonisation measures imposed upon accession
countries.
4. While the paper will only analyze cases where X is positive, the specification as such will also hold for negative
X , which indicates west-east migration.
5. See Wilson (2004) for a comparison of migration controls and subsidies in a similar model framework.
6. See Burgess (1988), Franz and K¨onig (1986) or Nickel and Symons (1990).
7. Wissenschaftlicher Beirat beim Bundesministerium der Finanzen (2001), Sinn et al. (2001), Sinn and Werding
(2001), Sinn (2002), and in particular the theoretical analysis by Richter (2004).
8. Sinn (1990, 2002). See also an extensive treatment of this issue in the context of EU legislation in Sinn (2003).
9. Wilson (2004) found that under certain conditions a combination of migration controls and subsidies would
yield more migration and higher welfare than subsidies alone if general equilibrium repercussions between
the government policies are taken into account. It would interesting to find out whether the dominance of
a combination of Selectively Delayed Integration and subsidy payments over migration controls found here
would carry over to the Wilson model.
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